Hotpoint Liberator De Luxe 1851-03
Sunday morning, I ventured out to the garage but only lasted 20 minutes, it’s to bloody cold, my weather stations monitor says it got down to -11c last night and as I type it is only -2c at noon
So I have spent the time I was out there looking at the speed module on the old girl, the diagrams supplied by Paul fascinated me, it’s a bit different to most I have come across in the past, the module is in two parts.
Boring ramblings over.
Red and black spade connections just right from the big black axel capacitor are for the thermistor
You can just see the connections to the MPC bottomed right
The main module which is located behind the options switches and has the connections to the timer for speed selection and the tacho for speed feed back.
And the power micro circuit board located next to the mains suppressor. It’s this smaller part that got my attention. It’s connected to the main module and the motor.
The power micro circuit holds the solid state switch (thyristor or SCR “silicon controlled rectifier”) which controls the voltage to the motor, this also indicated the motor runs on DC voltage and may explain the different sound the motor makes.
In all other speed modules I have looked at this part is on the main board fixed to the large heat sink (the part you don’t want to touch when the machine is switched on and normal has warnings all over it, because it will bite!!) and is normally a triac which switches AC current instead, but in this setup the solid state switch which must be of an isolated type as it is fixed to the back of the metal back plate to which the option switches ect are fixed to, so this plate must acted as the heat sink.
I have also noticed that the motor dose not seem to have a thermal cut-out for over heating protection fitted inline with the live feed, instead it has a thermistor (a resistor which changes according to temperature) fitted and this is connected to the main module separately, I can only surmise that if the motor get too hot the resistance changes with temperature and triggers some sort of protection circuit within the module.
